Modernist and abstract painter Paul Klee said: “The modern artist places more value on the powers that do the forming, than on the final forms.” Necessarily for Modernists, mystery was fact, something true that was simply beyond human understanding; it reflected humility and an acceptance of human limitations. The two world wars destroyed the foundations of Western Culture and therefore the Modernist belief system. The Post-modernists arose understanding that mystery is only fancy, something that filled ignorance with imagination. Given this tectonic shift, they treat prior generations with irony and ridicule. Post-modern artists and critics also necessarily believe that beauty, truth, Art and progress were concepts that had proven bankrupt because they were merely artificial restrictions placed on artists by a failed authority in its desire to maintain the status quo. Post-modernist hubris and resultant cynicism has reached such profound levels that for them all is material, which is to say everything is simply the result of chance and power relationships. The logical consequence of this belief system means that there is no essential self and that what had been previously considered the “self” was simply an illusion covering-up what is merely a pastiche of roles.
Photography was slower to respond to this series of events, however, and thus until after World War II fine art photography remained the quintessential Modernist art form and continued to “lag” artistically until into the mid-60’s. It was then that photographic art became Post-modern, celebrating not technical virtuosity and a Modernist concern with form, but an anti-art approach that put subject over form and flux and ambiguity over an objective reality that did not exist.
Thus, photography has come a long way from the straight modernist photography of the f-64 Group. The banal is now king, as contemporary photographers elevate the commonplace, replacing the romantic with the material, the sublime with the mundane. This site attempts in its own little way to push back against this tide and to reassert older values because claiming that beauty is a species of tyranny sounds like something Screwtape might argue.
No. 31: The Fall of Man
Modernist and abstract painter Paul Klee said: “The modern artist places more value on the powers that do the forming, than on the final forms.” Necessarily for Modernists, mystery was fact, something true that was simply beyond human understanding; it reflected humility and an acceptance of human limitations. The two world wars destroyed the foundations of Western Culture and therefore the Modernist belief system. The Post-modernists arose understanding that mystery is only fancy, something that filled ignorance with imagination. Given this tectonic shift, they treat prior generations with irony and ridicule. Post-modern artists and critics also necessarily believe that beauty, truth, Art and progress were concepts that had proven bankrupt because they were merely artificial restrictions placed on artists by a failed authority in its desire to maintain the status quo. Post-modernist hubris and resultant cynicism has reached such profound levels that for them all is material, which is to say everything is simply the result of chance and power relationships. The logical consequence of this belief system means that there is no essential self and that what had been previously considered the “self” was simply an illusion covering-up what is merely a pastiche of roles.
Photography was slower to respond to this series of events, however, and thus until after World War II fine art photography remained the quintessential Modernist art form and continued to “lag” artistically until into the mid-60’s. It was then that photographic art became Post-modern, celebrating not technical virtuosity and a Modernist concern with form, but an anti-art approach that put subject over form and flux and ambiguity over an objective reality that did not exist.
Thus, photography has come a long way from the straight modernist photography of the f-64 Group. The banal is now king, as contemporary photographers elevate the commonplace, replacing the romantic with the material, the sublime with the mundane. This site attempts in its own little way to push back against this tide and to reassert older values because claiming that beauty is a species of tyranny sounds like something Screwtape might argue.